A team of ambitious high school seniors band together to outsmart a highly sophisticated college admissions system.
Intense and provocative, but there is a “but”… Remakes and adaptations are tricky beasts. When filmmakers revisit a successful film, the challenge is not simply to replicate the original but to reinterpret it. The questions are simple but crucial: what exactly are you adapting, how are you adapting it, and – perhaps most importantly – for whom?
Bad Genius, directed by J. C. Lee, answers those questions with confidence, but raises some concerns – I’ll get there. The film reimagines the Thai original, Bad Genius (2017), which revolved around academic cheating and the social inequalities driving it. In Thailand, the narrative’s engine was primarily class struggle. Wealth and privilege collided with talent and necessity, creating a morally murky battlefield where cheating felt less like a crime and more like an act of rebellion against a rigged system.
The American adaptation keeps that skeleton but adds another layer to the equation: race. Here, the contrast becomes sharper – rich white kids with money but questionable intellect versus underprivileged minority students armed with brains, ambition, and a sense of moral conflict. It is, admittedly, a loaded dynamic. Privilege versus struggle. Comfort versus survival. People who already have everything, trying to squeeze even more out of those who have almost nothing. Hard to pick sides, isn’t it?
And yet, as a piece of entertainment, the film works remarkably well. It is extremely suspenseful, particularly during the cheating sequences. The montage scenes – where strategy, timing, and academic deception unfold like a heist movie – are the film’s beating heart. Through tight editing that emphasises precision, pulsating music, and clever visual rhythm, the film transforms exam halls into arenas of tension. It’s remarkable how much suspense can be squeezed out of pencil scratches and ticking clocks.
Technically speaking, the film is in very good hands, and Callina Liang, Benedict Wong, Jabari Banks, Taylor Hickson, Samuel Braun and the rest of the cast deliver strong, convincing performances across the board. The script also develops its central scheme effectively, allowing the story to escalate without collapsing under its own cleverness. As it escalates, it stumbles a bit, though, for that reason, especially in the end.
My only reservation, and the aforementioned “but” lies in how blunt some of the social commentary feels. The racial distinctions – white equals privileged, non-white equals underprivileged – are occasionally presented a little too forcefully, as if it’s black and white. Reality, as we all know, tends to operate in far more complicated shades of grey. It feels better when the audience understands for themselves rather than being presented with chewed food.
Still, beneath the thrills lies an interesting moral core. Regardless of IQ, teenagers (adults, too) remain naïve creatures navigating systems much larger than themselves. And the film raises yet another question: when it comes to elite universities, are we really talking about education – or simply about status?
Prestigious universities often function as powerful signals of status and access rather than pure indicators of intellectual ability. Once graduates enter the real world, however, reputation alone rarely guarantees success. Adaptability, creativity, and emotional intelligence matter far more than institutional prestige – raising the question of whether education today is about learning or social positioning. But that is a whole different can of worms. Enjoy the film!
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